Tag Archives | Subculture

As you all know, we’re not scared of a conspiracy theory or two here at disinformation, but we’re also skeptical, wanting to hear multiple views. Not so Jeff Nesbit of US News:

There’s just no polite way to put it.

There are big, entire parts of American society that believe in things that just aren’t true – and a recent national survey by Public Policy Polling only confirms it.

Name your conspiracy theory, and some segment of America believes it, the PPP survey found. The handful of news reports and blog posts on the PPP poll last week focused on the usual political subjects that always seem to float through the Internet ether.

About a fifth of Republican voters believe President Barack Obama is the anti-christ, for instance. Three quarters of Democrats believe former President George W. Bush’s administration lied about weapons of mass destruction in the run up to the Iraq war, while three quarters of Republicans don’t.

A police force has become the first in the country to record attacks on goths, emos and punks as hate crimes. Abuse towards alternative subcultures will be classed in the same way as those based on race, religion, disability or sexual orientation.

The historic move was welcomed by the mother of teenager Sophie Lancaster, who was kicked to death in Bacup, Lancashire in 2007 because she was dressed like a goth. Miss Lancaster, 20, was kicked and stamped to death because she was dressed as a goth in a park in Bacup in August 2007.

A police spokesman said: “From April 2013 Greater Manchester Police also now records alternative sub-culture related hate crime.” There are no immediate plans to change the national hate crimes register, but last year Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone acknowledged that the five recognized categories of hate crime was “an incomplete list”.

A subcultural style [cannot] be “owned”. The only way to ensure that your aesthetic is not going to become used by others is to never share it with anyone. Another approach is to protect your aesthetic with physical violence (see: gang colors). Otherwise, once you allow your presence to be seen, it can be consumed.

Most communities protect their culture through some form of obfuscation. Some of this practice is incredible.

“Whats the 411 on the local music show tonight?” …Life imitates art as authorities attempt, very poorly, to infiltrate and break up youth subculture by creating imaginary electronic personas, Slate reveals:

Boston police are finding out as their bungling efforts to infiltrate the underground rock scene online are being exposed. A recently passed nuisance control ordinance has spurred a citywide crackdown on house shows—concerts played in private homes, rather than in clubs. The police, it appears, are posing as music fans online to ferret out intel on where these DIY shows are going to take place.

This week the St. Louis band Spelling Bee posted a screencap of emails from an account that they believe was used by the police in a sting before their recent Boston show. It reads like an amazing parody of what you might imagine a cop trying to pose as a young punk would look like:

Are you a Futurist? Are you assured that we are going to burn ourselves out as a species in the next century? Are you an artist set on using these tools we have while we have the time, or an optimist set to create an army of Nanobots (or Nanobats, if you live in Gotham) that will cure cancer?

There is room for all these perspectives and more at this years Extreme Futurist Festival (XFF for short) being held in Los Angeles.

And December 21 and 22 2012! What a time for it. End of the world, man!

In 1967, the BBC program Wicker's World travelled to San Francisco to investigate the philosophy and lifestyle of what they dubbed "the Love Generation", who were "cracking the smooth silhouette of American materialism". Teen runaways, doing LSD in the woods, and confrontations with the square-minded are included in this vision of a time and place that resonates today:

I thought it would be interesting to continue the discussion from my previous post on “Steampunk and Anarchism” (found here). This next article by Magpie Killjoy explores the intersection of radical politics and steampunk fiction and aesthetic Via TOR.com:

I first consciously got into steampunk back in 2004. It was the perfect aesthetic lens for my interests: history, mad science, genre fiction, the underclasses, and radical politics. It was steampunk, really, that helped me realize how awesome it is to be classy yet poor, that we can celebrate individual and communal ingenuity without babbling on about how great this or that nation or empire might be.

Now, seven years later, I’m constantly amazed by how many people, including some of the most die-hard steampunk adherents, seem to believe that steampunk has nothing to offer but designer clothes. There are people (a minority, I would argue, just a loud one) who act like steampunk is simply a brassy veneer with which to coat the mainstream.

I wrote my first comic, Club Zero-G, as a monthly insert to the rave culture magazine BPM. When the magazine couldn't afford to continue the series, disinformation came to my rescue, giving me the pages I needed to tell the whole story in a single volume graphic novel, drawn by Steph Dumais. The story was about kids who shared the same dreamspace at night - a giant rave that none of them remember the next day in waking consciousness, except one boy.
That was more than a decade ago, but on the release of my latest graphic novel, A.D.D., I'm coming to realize that I am telling a similar story - this time about a gamer who sees things in the games that others don't. He's part of a group of kids raised from birth, or maybe even earlier, to test various forms of media. If they develop special abilities like our hero's, it is labeled as resistance and steps are taken to neutralize it.
A.D.D. stands for Adolescent Demo Division, but it's also an obvious reference to the sensory disorder plaguing so many kids today. And while it's still considered controversial or even dangerous to suggest, I'm hoping we start to consider the role that our "attention economy" may have in the massive increase of diagnoses.
In this short scene, we get a glimpse of our hero, Lionel, and his love...

When Patty Tegeler looks out the window of her home overlooking the Appalachian Mountains in southwestern Virginia, she sees trouble on the horizon.

“In an instant, anything can happen,” she told Reuters. “And I firmly believe that you have to be prepared.”
Tegeler is among a growing subculture of Americans who refer to themselves informally as “preppers.” Some are driven by a fear of imminent societal collapse, others are worried about terrorism, and many have a vague concern that an escalating series of natural disasters is leading to some type of environmental cataclysm.

They are following in the footsteps of hippies in the 1960s who set up communes to separate themselves from what they saw as a materialistic society, and the survivalists in the 1990s who were hoping to escape the dictates of what they perceived as an increasingly secular and oppressive government.

In the country’s most conservative region, authorities are rounding up young punks, removing their mohawks and piercings, and and shipping them off for military drills and manners lessons to ween them from their deviant ways. Suppose your punk rocker boyfriend/girlfriend got scooped up, sent off, and came back a square? The Guardian reports:

Police in Indonesia’s most conservative province have stripped away body piercings and shaved off mohicans from 65 youths detained at a punk-rock concert because of their perceived threat to Islamic values. After replacing their “disgusting” clothes, [a local police chief] handed each a toothbrush and barked: “Use it.”

Punk rockers have complained for months about harassment, but Saturday’s roundup at a concert attended by more than 100 people was by far the most dramatic. Dozens were loaded into vans and brought to a police detention centre in the hills, 30 miles from the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, for rehabilitation, training in military-style discipline and religious classes, including Qur’an recitation.